[yt-dev] PR to remove reason

[Michael Zingale]

Hi Matt, I think the main question for the project to answer is whether
there is demand for a GUI in the first place.  Many of us like yt because
it is just a python library, and we like written scripts or interacting
through the notebooks.

But new users may not be as comfortable with that.  Then the question
becomes is it worth it to create a GUI for them or to help them gain
familiarity with the library through nice tutorial notebooks (of which
there is already a good collection).

On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 10:33 AM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Nathan,
>
> This PR makes me really, really sad.
>
> The first version of Reason, back in 2007, was a wxPython GUI that
> basically Britton and I worked on.  Then there were a few other
> iterations, and finally this one, Reason v5 ("Cinco Analysis
> Generator") was a joint effort (lots of effort from Cameron), written
> in ExtJS 3.  There were two big components -- the python backend, and
> the javascript frontend.  This was the one that got presented at the
> yt workshop in Chicago.  Midway through 2012 I spent a bunch of time
> refactoring this to work with Ext JS 4 (the current layout of the
> javascript, along with the current javascript, is largely fully
> refactored and much of it rewritten from the ExtJS 3 code) and this
> was more extensible, with pluggable widgets and so on in an easier,
> more defined way.
>
> Of the various components, the Python portion is definitely the part
> that would need the most work to maintain, and also is probably the
> one that would be the most unwise to maintain.  The ExtJS4 stuff,
> which is in principle not impossible to maintain, should probably be
> let go, as much as it pains me.  It's a nice framework, and I'm proud
> of what it is, but it's heavyweight and very project specific.  It
> could be made much more generic ... but first we'd have to maintain
> it.  And I think that while the JS is likely not too hard to maintain
> in stasis at this point, the Python code would be a pain.
> Theoretically we could swap out the Python execution backend for
> Jupyter (basing it on something like the way Thebe operates) but I'm
> not sure the overall value there for us.
>
> That's not to say there isn't a set of lessons we can learn, but this
> was a big push, and I think maybe in the end larger projects with more
> resources and expertise should be utilized, rather than going it
> ourselves on this (thinking here of Jupyter).  I'm okay with it going.
> I guess.
>
> -Matt
>
> On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 3:43 PM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I've opened a pull request to remove the reason GUI here:
> >
> > https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/pull-requests/1719
> >
> > As I mentioned in my e-mail a couple weeks ago about cleaning up the
> > codebase, most of the functionality provided by reason is currently
> > disabled. It could be re-enabled, but someone would need to commit to
> > maintaining it and go through the work of updating the python side of
> things
> > to work with the current state of yt.
> >
> > If anyone is invested in the reason gui and thinks my pull request is not
> > the way to go, please feel free to comment on the pull request so we can
> > start a discussion about what to do.
> >
> > Thanks for your time,
> >
> > -Nathan
> >
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> >
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-- 
Michael Zingale
Associate Professor

Dept. of Physics & Astronomy • Stony Brook University • Stony Brook, NY
11794-3800
*phone*:  631-632-8225
*e-mail*: Michael.Zingale at stonybrook.edu
*web*: http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/mzingale
github: http://github.com/zingale
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